Quick Introduction

Hi

I wanted to introduce myself and couldn't find the appropriate forum (didn't look amazingly hard though). My name is Andrew Becker and I'm a Mechanical Engineering student (3rd year). I've just finished converting a Kondia FV-1 to cnc using steppers and LinuxCNC and so far have been very impressed with the level of completion of the software and am having a lot of fun. I am a Linux user as of last year when Windoze stopped accepting my legally purchaced licence so the transition was fairly easy. I have had a couple of minor issues which I've worked through (and one which I haven't as of yet) and have a whole lot of questions to ask but I will try put them each in the appropriate forum. I have also begun writing a bit of code to convert .stl files to 5 axis code specifically focused of cylinder head porting ... see my pic ... and I'm hoping to finish it as a part of my thesis. I'm looking forward to getting to know the community and hopefully contributing to the effort.

Cheers

Andrew

Hello and welcome to the world of LinuxCNC.

I have also begun writing a bit of code to convert .stl files to 5 axis code specifically focused of cylinder head porting

Cool.

Rick G

Thanks

I'm only going to do the core of the code for my purposes but I'll make it avaliable for anyone who might feel moved to make it more generic and user friendly. At the moment it just reads the .stl and creates a file of the profiles that intersect a series of planes with the inward pointing normals at each point. I still have to turn this into G-code and modify the normal so that the tool passes throught the port opening but I've got a good idea of how I'm going to do this I just need to code the math. I also want to make a viewer so that the user can see the solid, the intersection planes and the generated code with tool angle, but this is just eye candy.

I have plenty of ideas for features and improvements that will make the process more robust but I doubt I'll do much more than I strictly need. I've also played around with the cnctoolkit which creates 5-axis files for external surfaces and I have no intention of reinventing the wheel so I won't include anything that can be easily done with that .

If I can have a 5 second b*tch this all came about because I tried to contact 3 companies about 5 axis cam software and none replied, I don't know how companies like that make money.

Andrew

Hi John

I'll take some over the weekend (I've banned mysef from the workshop during the week until I've finished exams ) and post them.

Andrew

Ok I'm back. Here are the pics of the machine (rather late than never) along with some pieces I machined for a friends racecar. Still a couple of minor issues to attend to but for the most part everything is going well. I still have to swap from the standard ball bearings to angular contact bearings, I have about 90 micron backlash at the moment and I hope that it will reduce it significantly. I have no backlash correction setup at the moment I'm saving that for once I feel that the mechanics of my conversion are as good as they're going to get. I also still have to wire the spindle and coolant switches to the hardware so that I can switch them automatically. Lastly (on my list but probably first to get done) is installing some limit switches. So far Linux CNC has been awesome to work with although I certainly haven't strayed off the beaten track as far as setup goes. Progress on the 5 axis software progressed well but ground to a halt with exams (as expected) the picture shows the point cloud output of the software which is only a small step from useable g-code. A fair bit of cleaning up to do before it's properly useable though.

Some of the wiring, the driver for the A - axis is there but has nothing to drive yet.

The first thing I machined from billet. A little rough but perfect fit for purpose.

This is my race car, 90% of the machining I do will be for this.